Software applications that operate in the System Management field, base their function on a predefined set of information. This is for example the case with Software Inventory products, e.g. IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager (ITCM) of International Business Machines Corporation, which need to correlate the existence of a certain file on the file system with a certain product. This correlation information is stored within the application repository. Another example comes from license management products, e.g. IBM Tivoli License Manager (ITLM) of International Business Machines Corporation, where information about the actual program execution (myProgram.exe) needs to be correlated to predefined product.
Another example is the Application Monitoring discipline, where the management system is used to monitor the state of applications running on servers. In this case the management system needs to know each of the monitored application interface one by one as each application has it's own method to check application status and its own method to start and stop executions.
The setup and maintenance of this predefined set of information when dealing with large scale environments can act as a limiting factor for the affected System Management applications.
This information needs to be collected from Software Development teams that develop the Applications that are subject to Management Discipline. Then the information needs to be managed and stored into databases normally known as Knowledge Base. Finally the information needs to be extracted from the KB into a format that is consumable by the System Management Application.
Normally this knowledge base is in the form of a catalogue which contains definitions of software products (e.g. product names and version) and the related signature. The software catalogue lists all the known products which can be found on the managed systems; each product can be identified by one or more executable modules indicative of its running. As an example, in the case of a License Manager product, a licensing agent working in the background detects the executable modules that have been launched; the licensing agent then identifies the corresponding products through the software catalogue. The catalogue needs to be “populated” and this is normally a costly activity.
Several IT management solutions exist that perform the discovery of installed software for either inventory or licensing purposes. One form of software discovery that is particularly effective exploits a previously defined signature for each product that has to be discovered. The term signature means any type of information that can be consumed by a software discovery application to determine the presence of one or more instances of a software product on a given computer. A typical and particularly simple implementation of a signature is one that specifies the file-name and the file-size of a key application file. In this case, detecting a file with matching characteristics would cause the signature to be matched, thus indicating that the associated software product is installed. One advantage of a signature-based approach to software discovery is that the matching of a signature can be correlated by a management application to a precise definition (name, version, etc.) of the entity (software product) being discovered. A software inventory application which exploits signature-based discovery of installed software therefore has the need of accessing a comprehensive knowledge base of product and signature definitions. The challenge of this approach is to maintain its content up-to-date with respect to:                new software products being continuously made available;        maintenance updates to existing software products.        
The value of the Knowledge Base is directly proportional to the coverage and accuracy of its content, therefore the problem is how to guarantee coverage and accuracy at an affordable cost.
It would therefore be highly desirable an improved method which could help reducing the Knowledge Base management overhead while introducing a scalable and efficient method to deal with the information that are needed at runtime.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and a system which alleviates the above drawbacks.